How the ‘Great Migration Troll’ Hacks Our Minds: Trigger, Experience, Reaction (I)
How the ‘Great Migration Troll’ Hacks Our Minds: Trigger, Experience, Reaction (I)
Ekman / Dalai Lama ‘Timeline of Emotions’ cognitive model module in Disinfolklore.
The best tool I can teach you comes from a joint project by the Nobel Peace Prize winning Dalai Lama and the psychologist Paul Ekman.
Their Three Step “Timeline of Emotions” model helps us find a pattern in the oodles of emotional journeys we are stimulated to participate in each day, hour, minute and second.
Almost all the stimulations in our environment trigger an experience of an emotion, and often a concatenation of emotions we sometimes have difficulty interpreting the meaning of in real time. How we react to such triggered experiences has a huge impact on the way we live.
We can read this “Timeline of Emotions” model - Trigger, Experience, Reaction - into a huge variety of emotionally resonant story telling forms - from Russian Disinformation to contemporary films, advertising, courting strategies and, really, any accidental or strategic measures that we (or others) use to affect emotions.
I am going to labour this point because it is so important to understand how Disinfolklore works, and how we can work to counter Disinfolklore. So please be prepared for some repetition - Counter Disinfolklore is as much a manual as anything else, and repetition, as every Disinfolklorist (and counter Disinfolklorist!) knows, helps embed ideas in our minds.
Step 1: Something in your environment triggers your emotions.
Step 2: You experience a feeling / feelings with a certain (set of) qualities: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, or enjoyment.
Step 3: You react in a particular way, either reflexively (automatically) or carefully, to that feeling.
I want us counter Disinfolklorists to embed this way of modelling a mental routine we experience a thousand times a day into our minds: Trigger, Experience, Reaction. It is essential for realising the full power of Disinfolklore as an analytical method for parsing Russian (and indeed all forms of) Disinformation, and much else besides.
Suppose the idea that Outer Realm immigrants are a Bad Thing has been promoted relentlessly in your culture’s information space. Such immigrants are portrayed as a threat to your Inner Realm’s cultural sovereignty, security, and sustainability (fertility) - this Inner Realm (think of the princess’s færy tale castle surrounded by a moat) and Outer Realm division is immanent in most forms of effective Disinfolklore in Indo-European cultures, and we will investigate why this might be the case in a later chapter.
Think of the suitor planning to scale the Inner Realm castle’s battlements to capture the princess who represents the sovereignty (if the invader can mate with the princess, their child will have a right to the throne), security (if the invader can steal away the monarch’s child, that is a significant violation of the realm’s security), and sustainability (the future of the realm depends on the fertility of its people, including its royal family, and if a princess is stolen then that fertility is affected).
Once the negative stereotyping of immigrants as violators of the Inner Realm’s sovereignty, security and sustainability has been achieved, through relentless repetitive Disinfolklore, all a political campaigner seeking to exploit the disgust, fear, and anger that culture has learned to associate with the idea of immigrants needs to do to trigger tumult is to mention “immigration.”
Many will then experience feelings of anger, disgust and/or fear. Then, when the exploitative political campaigner suggests a “solution” we will feel relief.
It has often been demonstrated in peer-reviewed research that once certain kinds of personality types become convinced their rights are being threatened, they lose the capacity to assess rationally information. Their emotions are triggered by the Disinfolklorist, and then almost any dumb idea can be implanted in their mind as a means of resolving the entirely concocted threat.
Two indictments of Trump were issued in 2023 in separate cases relating to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results through unlawful means - the Jan 6th and the Georgia indictment respectively. They illustrate a perfect case study of how Trump triggered the anger, disgust, and sadness of his most fervent supporters, by repeating the same troll over and over again. And of how, having triggered these emotions, repeatedly, Trump used his communications expertise to persuade his most fervent supporters to react in ways which were unlawful. Over two thousand of his supporters faced criminal proceedings as a result of reacting to Trump’s triggering of their disgust, fear, anger and sadness…
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For orientation purposes: This is the I element of Chapter Two of Disinfolklore - a new analytical method for parsing Disinformation:
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